


between the wars, we stay

by aftertherockets



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Feelings, Fluff and Angst, Future Fic, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-31
Updated: 2017-01-31
Packaged: 2018-09-21 04:24:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9531362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aftertherockets/pseuds/aftertherockets
Summary: Clarke and Bellamy have one last conversation in the dropship, before leaving it behind forever.





	

It’s coming on dark by the time Bellamy makes it to the dropship. 

He’d left Arkadia while the sun was still clinging to the treetops, filtering light down through the leaves to warm his shoulders. There’s a chill to the air now, to match the darkening sky. He hopes Clarke wore her heavy jacket.

Bellamy hasn’t been back here since the time with Pike and Monty, since his sister dragged him through the woods by his wrists, months ago now. He’d been too preoccupied then to catalogue all the little changes the earth has wrought in his absence, but they’re hard to ignore now. 

Like the fine layer of soft grass spreading out across the once well-trod ground, or the tree whose long knotted branches used to hover protectively over the dropship roof that’s been entirely uprooted, taking pieces of the side paneling down with it. There’s a twisted vine of ivy winding and weaving its way around and around and up the ship, reaching toward the sky. 

Everywhere, signs that the ground never stops trying to reclaim what his people want to keep for their own.

It's something to remember, in the days ahead. They’ve managed to stop a couple of nearby reactors from overloading and completely destroying their little corner of the world with the usual cocktail of Raven’s brain and blind luck, but in the end it wasn’t enough to save their home. They’re leaving, they have to. Arkadia isn’t going to be safe much longer.

Bellamy’s not so sure there’s anything out there resembling safe to be found, but it’s a battle he’s conceded for now. If his people are going, there’s no way he’s leaving them to wander anywhere on their own.

He makes his way up to the dropship door, where the old tattered tarp has been pushed to the side in clear invitation. Like he’s expected. 

Stepping over the threshold, he finds the first level empty, and in the dying light it’s hard to make out more than just the shape of what his life was here. It occurs to him, eyes flitting quickly around the room, that this is probably the last time he’ll ever see it.

He doesn’t linger.

The hatch to the second level is open, faint light spilling down the ladder like a homing beacon. Bellamy pulls himself up quickly, taking care to let his boots land heavy on each rung. At first glance, it’s not immediately apparent that there’s anyone up here either, but then a loud crash and a flash of blonde hair on the other side of the room prove otherwise.

Clarke is crouched down low facing away from him, legs planted stubbornly as she tries to pry up what looks like a piece of the flooring itself. She’s cracked a couple of light sticks and scattered them, bathing the room in a soft yellow glow. One of the crudely constructed tables they’d used as a work station has clattered to its side next to her.

“Hey, come here and help me with this,” she says without looking up, back still turned to him.

Bellamy leans back on the ladder just taking Clarke in for a second, can’t help the curl of a smile at the sight of her, dressed in the same flimsy layers she’d had on when they’d parted ways at breakfast that morning. 

It’s been _hours_ since breakfast. 

He schools his face into something more neutral even though she can’t see it. “I could have been anyone. I could have been a half-starved grounder wandering in here on the promise of a good meal.”

She snorts. “What, roast Sky Girl with a side of seat belts and bandages? Appetizing.” Clarke keeps struggling fruitlessly with the floor, huffing in frustration. “Okay, but you aren’t some half-starved grounder come to eat me, you’re exactly who I thought you were, so come over here and help me please.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re so smart,” Bellamy grumbles and crosses over, ducking down next to her and pressing closer than he strictly has to. Now that he’s found her, the need to feel her solid beside him, even if only for a moment, is overwhelming. “What am I helping you with?”

“I can’t get this panel up.” As she says it, Clarke’s fingers slip their grip on the metal sheeting and she loses her balance, nearly toppling over. Bellamy’s there with an arm around her waist, keeping her upright, before he can even think about it. She tips her face up to his with a wry smile, and Bellamy has to suck in a breath at her closeness. He resolutely does not let his gaze drift down to her lips.

They stay like that for a few beats, eyes locked, his arm still holding her close, until Clarke shakes her head slightly and pulls herself out of his grasp. Bellamy misses the weight of her against him immediately.

She gestures downward without breaking eye contact. “You gonna help me out or what?”

“Yeah.” He has to shake himself a little, too. “Yeah, obviously. But again, what am I helping you with exactly?” He reaches around her and pulls the overturned table toward him, snaps off one of the legs and wedges it under Clarke’s stubborn floor panel, popping it up easily.

Clarke rolls her eyes at him. “Show off,” she says, before pushing him out of the way and diving into the newly exposed hole in the floor. Clarke roots around for a second and then-- “Ha! Found it.” She holds up a book and waves it under his nose in triumph. It’s small, barely bigger than the span of her hand, with a worn cover that might have been blue once. The binding is cracked along the spine, whatever lettering used to be there having long since faded.

“What is it?”

She nudges him with her shoulder and motions for him to follow her as she settles cross-legged against the wall. When Bellamy drops down beside her, she’s the one to move in closer to him this time. 

It's a new thing between them, this constant proximity, a willingness to occupy each other’s space. More than a willingness, it feels like a necessity. They've always been tactile with one another, but carefully, and always with purpose. Lately, the air feels charged with something new and magnetizing between them, in a way the comfort they've always sought in each other never has before. Most of the time it’s like there's this weight pressing down on his chest right until the moment she’s there next to him again, steady and unyielding. Until he can feel Clarke’s warmth seeping into his own, and he can breathe again. 

He doesn’t know if she feels the same, or if she’s noticed and taken pity enough to meet him halfway; he’s not sure the answer matters to him.

Clarke pages through the book gingerly and he can see now that it must have been her sketchbook, back when they lived here. He recognizes Clarke’s bold strokes on every page as she thumbs through it, catching flashes of the razor sharp slice of Raven’s jaw, the defiant set of his sister’s mouth. 

“I used to spend more time in here than in my tent, so I started stashing the stuff I used all the time.” She glares briefly down at the hole in the floor. “It didn’t used to be so hard to get into.” 

“Good thing you did.”

“Or this would have burned up in the fire with everything else? Yeah, I know,” she says, still flicking through page after page crowded with all the people he first learned to think of as _his_

Clarke lets out a quiet breath when she finds what she was looking for. It’s Wells staring up out of the page, the unmistakable crinkle of laughter in his eyes, the stark lines of the Ark sketched out around him. On the opposite page is a man who can only be Jake Griffin.

“That’s your dad?”

She nods and traces a finger lightly, almost reverently, down his form on the thin paper. Jake’s standing in the middle of what Bellamy guesses were Clarke’s quarters on the Ark. His arms are held loose at his sides, his smile warm and adoring as he’s looking at someone just off the page.

“You look like him,” Bellamy says.

Clarke hums her disagreement. “I look like my mother.”

“Yeah. But there’s a lot of him in you, too.” There’s something gentle and inviting in Jake Griffin’s face, something Bellamy sees looking back at him through Clarke’s eyes more and more these days, since they managed to narrowly avert another apocalypse. It’s something he wants so badly to protect.

“He had blue eyes like me,” she says, as though sensing where his thoughts are. She heaves out a sigh and leans her head on his shoulder. “I don’t really remember the exact color anymore. That’s not--this drawing, it’s not quite right. It’s my dad, but not all of him. I worked on this one for hours and I couldn’t get it right. But I guess...he’d already been gone a year by then, maybe I’d already lost too much of him.”

Bellamy reaches for her hand, tentative, and laces his fingers with hers. She squeezes back gratefully. He thinks of his mother, tries to bring up a picture of her face, but there’s only dark hair and tired eyes, and the feeling that he’s not doing enough. 

He swallows, pushing the thought of Aurora Blake away.

“I don’t know about your dad, but you definitely got Wells right.”

“Yeah?” she asks.

“I mean, I didn’t know him very well, it was only a few days. But I think you really captured that look of his.”

“Which look was that?”

“You know. The one where he thought you were wrong and he definitely knew better than you, but he was going to stare you down and let you get there on your own, because he just really believed in his heart that you would.”

Her laugh is sudden, bright. It echoes sweetly. She tucks her face into him and groans good-naturedly, and Bellamy has to hide his pleased grin in her hair. He needs to make her laugh more. 

“Try growing up with him, it was infuriating. ‘Oh Clarke, do you think you should be drawing on that?’ ‘Oh Clarke, you have to eat better.’ ‘Oh Clarke, that’s not how math works.’ And he was always right, is the worst part.”

“And the princess didn’t like that.”

She tenses a little, and he worries for a second that he’s overstepped and shattered the easy atmosphere he was working on. She hasn’t been that girl to him for so long, and he doesn’t want her to think otherwise. But Clarke only smiles. “No, she did not.”

Clarke goes quiet, staring down at those faces she loved, her mind miles and years away, and the whole room grows a little heavier with her silence. 

“I wonder, sometimes, what the ground would have done to him.” It’s a whisper, like she can’t believe she’s saying it out loud. Clarke looks up at him, her mouth twisted painfully, and it’s all he can do not to lift his thumb to her lips to unravel some of that pain, ease some of her burden. “Wells. I think about all the things he missed that he would have liked. You know, sunrises over the water, or--how good fruit tastes in spring. And it _hurts_ , that he never got to experience any of it. But then I think about all the things we’ve done, who we’ve become. Sometimes I think maybe it’s better the ground never got to hurt him, never got to turn him into something else. Is that--is that terrible?”

He wants to tell her no. It’s knee-jerk, it’s an entirely ingrained response. They’ve been having some variation of this conversation since the very beginning, trading reassurances back and forth that somewhere, underneath everything, they’re both people worth more than the awful things they’ve done. He can’t always believe it about himself, but he tries, for Clarke. Because he’ll never believe in a world that sees Clarke as anything less than what she is. And for some reason, she’s never stopped believing in him.

Right now, it doesn’t really feel like reassurance is what she wants, but he’s not sure what else he has to offer.

“It’s not terrible, Clarke.” She deflates, sagging against him a little. “It’s not. I get it. The girl O was back on the Ark--that was never a life for her, it was never gonna be a life--but sometimes, I just--I miss her.”

Clarke disentangles their hands and squirms her way under his arm, wraps both of hers around his waist and burrows into his chest. “So we’re both terrible, is what you’re actually saying.”

He laughs, and tucks her in closer without even thinking about it. “That’s what I was trying not to say.”

“Well, you did a crappy job of it.”

“Sorry. I’ll try harder next time,” he says, running a soothing hand down her back. 

Clarke curls into him a little more, nosing into his shirt and breathing deep like she’s memorizing the smell of him for a test she plans to ace. He freezes, suddenly hyperaware of every point of contact between them. This is new territory for them. 

His whole body starts to string itself tight, despite himself. 

It’s not _unwelcome_ territory. If anything, it’s something they’ve been purposely avoiding in the weeks since ALIE. Dealing with the reactor problem has meant a lot of late, sleepless nights together, and they’ve been careful to hold themselves a bit apart from each other.

It’s not like it was easy, to keep a table or a room between them while going over maps and plans and endlessly rehashing ideas on how to save the world, but it was always wordlessly agreed that they would. Anything else seemed like too big a risk to their partnership. When the hours dragged on and her eyes would begin to linger too long on his mouth, or his body would start to bend closer and closer toward hers involuntarily, one or the both of them always managed to cut the night short. Save them from falling.

It wasn't until total disaster had been mostly averted and the plans to migrate from Arkadia began to solidify that it had become easier, each night, to inch closer together by degrees, while aggressively pretending not to notice. Nothing more than sharing comfort and body heat, shoulder pressed to shoulder as often as possible, but enough that he misses it when she’s gone.

So this, Clarke wrapped around him, matching her breathing to his, violates every unspoken rule they’ve lived by since climbing down that tower in Polis.

The wind creaks by on the other side of the wall they’re leaning against. Unease crawls down his spine. Bellamy wants nothing more than to sink back into that obliviously warm feeling of being cocooned up with Clarke in this place they used to call home, but he doesn’t know how. Like when you suddenly come aware of your own breathing, and then can’t think of anything else.

He's not panicking. Panicking would be counterproductive. After all, this is what he wants, all the time, isn’t it? But the vice isn’t lifting from his chest the way it usually does when he finally gets Clarke next to him. This is too much of a leap past every marker of normal for them. It’s a boundary he wasn’t ready to test. He doesn’t know what lies past it when there’s nothing holding them back.

Clarke doesn’t seem fazed, or else hasn’t noticed he’s begun his own personal nuclear meltdown in her arms. If anything, she seems more at ease draped around him than he’s seen her in weeks, her sadness from before having drifted entirely away. 

He tries to focus on that. It’s not like they’ve had much downtime since--well, since the early days at the dropship maybe. If this is helping her, he absolutely wants to support it.

He’d just also like to be able to enjoy it without feeling like she’s flipped his whole world on its axis. Again. Clarke’s good at doing that.

“Hey,” she says in that low, husky voice she uses when she really wants him to pay attention, and his whirling thoughts screech to a halt. She scratches at his side a little, and he lets it ground him. Bellamy closes his eyes and focuses on nothing but the movement of her fingers. Breathes deep, once, twice, again.

Of course she noticed, she always notices.

He opens his eyes again, and bands his arm a little tighter around her back in thanks. She hums against him, and he feels it spark through him down to his toes.

Clarke’s sketchbook has fallen to the side, so he pulls it into his lap for something to do while he re-centers himself around yet another new configuration of who they’re allowed to be to each other. He flips through it with his free hand until he lands on something that feels safe enough -- a picture of Monty and Jasper sitting by the firepit grinning at each other.

“I forgot about those stupid goggles,” Bellamy murmurs, sweeping his eyes over Jasper’s smiling face and hating the familiar ache in his throat at the memory of the part he played in wiping that smile away. 

Even his attempts at distraction sting. This one, at least, is a hurt he’s used to. 

He turns the page. 

“When did you even have time to do all these?” he asks softly.

“I didn’t really sleep much back then,” she says, matching his tone.

 _Still don’t_ , he thinks, but it’s not a fight he wants to have right now. Instead he shuffles idly through Clarke’s drawings, strokes his thumb up and down her shoulder, and decides he should soak up every bit of this moment alone with her that he can. He can figure out what it all means later. With the exodus from Arkadia bearing down on them there’s no telling when he’ll get one like it again.

And it’s nice, being able to sit still with Clarke for a minute, their only responsibility to each other. It won’t be long before one of them remembers to feel guilty about taking time for themselves when there’s always so much to do. He should make the most of it.

“I came looking for you after my shift,” he says after a few moments.

“Mmm,” Clarke mumbles into his chest. “I think I was driving Jackson crazy trying to go over the packing lists again, he practically kicked me out of medical with his actual foot. I can probably get a little--obsessive about this kind of thing.”

“Probably?” 

Clarke tightens her arms around him, not a little meanly. “Shut up. You’re the exact same way and you know it. Tell me you haven’t checked over the ammunition inventory twelve times just _today_.”

He does the math in his head. “Okay, only about half that.”

“Yeah, my point stands.”

“Anyway,” he says, deliberate. “Jackson kicked you out, so you came here?” _Without me_ , he doesn’t say, but she must hear it anyway, because she draws back just enough to look up at him with alarm pulling at her eyes.

“I left you a note, you didn’t get it?”

He shakes his head. “I didn’t get a note.”

“I put a note on your bed that I was coming here and I’d try to be back for dinner. I didn’t want you to worry. My fault for assuming your room is a place you’d go, I guess.” She flicks a finger hard against his collarbone and settles back in against him. “If you didn’t get my note, how’d you know where I was?”

He glances down, sheepish. “I, uh--your mom said you went for a walk, and I figured, I don’t know. Where else would you go?”

“Your first thought was that I went for a nice afternoon stroll all the way to the dropship?”

“I was right, wasn’t I?”

“Yeah, and if you weren’t? You were just going to turn around and go all the way back alone in the middle of the night?”

“I brought a radio! Raven said she’d call me if you made it back before I did.”

“You’re ridiculous,” she says, fond.

Bellamy huffs, but it’s not like he can deny it. He did leave camp with no real idea where she was or how long she’d be gone. It would have served him right to get here and find the place empty. But as soon as Abby had told him Clarke had left Arkadia early that afternoon, he knew exactly where she’d gone. Bellamy didn’t question why he was so certain at the time, but now that he’s here it makes sense. Of course this is where she went. 

Of course he was going to go after her.

“I wish you’d waited. I would have come with you,” Bellamy says quietly.

“I really thought I’d be back sooner. I didn’t count on getting beaten by the floor. Besides,” she says, looking up at him, “you’re here now.”

“Yeah,” he says, looking right back.

The room seems to narrow down, as it so often does these days, to just her face, so close to his, and the look of promise in her eyes. 

Something bangs loudly up against the ship outside, and the moment breaks. Bellamy sighs, either in relief or disappointment. A little of both. He closes his eyes and leans his head back against the wall, casts around for something to say before his quietly mounting awkwardness has a chance to take hold. “So, you really came all the way out here just for your old sketchbook?”

Clarke lets out a slow breath. “I guess I did. I don’t know. I was on shift all day when they came to strip everything out of here and couldn’t go with them.” She picks absently at the hem of his collar. “I thought about asking Raven to get it for me, but it seemed like a silly thing to ask her to waste time on. And it’s--personal. I wouldn’t want just anyone looking through it.”

He hears what she’s not saying and his heart stutters, as it always does, in the face of Clarke’s stubborn certainty of the place he holds in her life. 

He’s not just anyone to her.

It’s not that Bellamy doesn’t know that. Of course he does. He’s as important to her as she is to him, he’d be stupid to try to pretend otherwise, after everything they’ve seen each other through. But knowing it is something altogether different from admitting it outside the closely guarded corners of his heart. Clarke’s constant, casual acceptance of something so enormous, _he matters to her_ , it’s still staggering sometimes.

He clears his throat. Definitely not panicking. “I don’t think it’s silly. I bet Raven wouldn’t have, either.”

“Maybe.”

“I’m serious. This is like--a record. Of who we were. You don’t think that’s important, moving forward?”

She makes a disbelieving noise. “I don’t think my late night insomnia drawings count as historical record, Bellamy.”

“Why not? How else do you think history gets passed on?”

“It’s not like--I don’t want to forget where we came from. I’m just not sure I’m the one who should be in charge of remembering,” she says.

It’s the stupidest thing, that they never seem to stop having this argument and neither of them have ever been able to win it.

All the same, he hopes they never stop trying.

But here, at least, is something he can give her. Her sketchbook is still in his lap, and he flips backwards through it until he finds a drawing she’d breezed by earlier. Bellamy flattens the pages out carefully, and nudges the book so it’s facing Clarke directly.

It’s a series, stretched out across both pages. Four figures in profile, and they’re all him. The first is more an outline than anything, a suggestion of himself, standing tall and immovable with the plain lines of a guard jacket crossing his chest, hair slicked back in Ark regulation. The next is shaded in just a little more, smirk on his lips and gun tucked into his waistband. In the third he’s dragging a hand down his face, eyes stricken, mouth set angrily. The last is the most detailed, him propped against a tree, exhausted and browbeaten and covered in grime, staring with a mournful intensity at an unseen Clarke.

An image of her flickers behind his eyelids unbidden. Clarke, hunched over her book, alone in the late hours of the night, all of that single-minded focus of hers pouring into these drawings of him. 

How long did it take her? How long did he hold her attention? How much time did he spend in her head, in her hands, as she put his rough shape to these pages?

His stomach twists not unpleasantly at the thought of it. She didn’t even really like him then.

But Bellamy has a larger point here. He taps a finger on the last drawing of himself, by the tree. The night Clarke changed his life. Not for the first time, and certainly not the last, but the one he marks as a beginning. Their beginning. “You remember this guy?”

“Yeah, of course,” she answers, quiet, a little unsure.

“He was terrified, and lost, and completely in over his head. His sister--” he falters. “His sister hated him, and he was drowning in so much guilt it was hard to keep breathing from one minute to the next.”

“Bellamy--” she starts.

“I still feel that way, a lot of the time. Just, fucking _crushed_ underneath the weight of--everything. But looking at this picture, I can remember what happened after that.”

“What happened?”

“You did.”

Clarke lets go of him and slides out of his hold on her so she can look him fully in the eye, brows furrowed in confusion. This time he doesn’t stop himself from smoothing his thumb across the lines there.

“My whole life, you were the first person who ever fought for me,” he says, like a secret. It feels like one.

Her eyes have gone heavy and half-lidded when she reaches for his hand and grips it hard, like the momentary loss of contact between them was too much. It’s not like Bellamy disagrees.

“I don’t want to forget that, Clarke. I don’t want to forget any of it, but--I don’t want to forget that.” 

She’s quiet a moment, her eyes searching his in that way she has that always sees right through him. Her face is determined, resolute but forgiving, and god, he loves her so much. 

“You don’t need a sketchbook for that, Bellamy. I came to get it because I remembered it was here, and--I liked the idea of having it, and I knew I had the time. Not because we need it.” Her voice goes sweet like rain, and it doesn’t waver. “I’m always going to fight for you. And I’m always going to be here, making sure you never forget it.”

He loves her _so much_.

Bellamy pulls her back into him, because he's tired of denying himself what she's willingly offering up. She goes without hesitation, looping an arm around his shoulders while the other gets trapped between them where she’s still holding onto his hand. He fits his chin into his favorite spot in the crook of her neck and just breathes her in for a second, closes his eyes so he can commit this moment to memory, too. 

The rough fabric of her jacket scraping against his jaw, the long shaky breath she drags in, the way her heart is beating rapidly against their intertwined hands. He wants to take it all with him every step of the way into the next life they build together. Whatever it is.

It’s only a few seconds where Clarke holds on, unmoving, but her pulse won’t settle. Finally she leans back, lets her eyes roam over his face. She pulls her bottom lip between her teeth, nods slightly, and comes to a decision.

When she leans back in this time, it’s with a halting press of her lips against his. It’s a question, and one he’s never quite had an answer for.

He doesn’t really remember what it was like, not wanting her. He knows there was a time when he could look at her without wondering what it would feel like to get her warm and pliant under his hands, but it’s like trying to remember a dream. Hazy around the edges, and incomprehensible.

What he does remember, in agonizing technicolor detail, is what it was like to live without her for all those months she was gone. It’s not that he doesn’t trust her. She’s not going to leave him behind again, he _knows_ that, but he also knows he couldn’t survive losing her a second time. And he’s never wanted to risk giving her a reason to go.

The kiss only lasts a second or two, not enough time for him to figure out what he wants to do. Clarke pulls away, but only goes far enough to rest her forehead against his. Her eyes are pressed tight together, like she can’t bear to face what she might see in his. 

Her heart is still racing.

“Okay?” she breathes. 

Is it? Honestly, he still doesn’t know. This could be the best thing that ever happened to him. Or it could break everything.

Those little pinpricks of fear and unease start crackling under his skin again. He’s known for the last few months, somewhere in the hidden, locked down parts of his brain, that they were always heading here, to this moment of decision. Except it had always been in a vague, nebulous future where the world agreed to stop and let them breathe for a few minutes, and they could finally take the time they were given for themselves. But to be faced with it here, now? Hurtling inescapably toward the other side of that choice, whatever it is?

Everything they’ve seen and done since they touched ground on this unforgiving planet, and fuck, he’s never been so scared.

But this is _Clarke_ next to him, asking him for whatever he’s ready to give, and there’s never been a fear he couldn’t conquer with her by his side.

So he threads his fingers loose through her hair, and cups her jaw to bring her mouth back to his. The first slow meeting of their lips feels somehow familiar for all that this is the closest he’s ever managed to get to her. It’s just an extension of who they’ve already been together. Clarke melts against him, and for a minute his world is soft and warm and everything he’s only just realizing he’s been missing all this time.

But then she shifts, trying to deepen the kiss, and huffs out an annoyed groan at the awkward angle. She swings a leg over so she’s straddling him, and every carefully drawn line between them _snaps_ , in a sudden frenzy of tangled limbs and clacking teeth and Bellamy sliding his hand under her shirt to graze up her spine, pulling her closer, closer. Clarke whimpers approval into his mouth, circling her arms around his neck and holding on tight. Her skin feels like relief under his fingertips, and it’s the easiest thing to get caught up in her. To lose himself in the fire igniting in the gaping cavern inside him, in the feeling of hope banging wildly against his ribcage, begging to finally be let out.

She gasps and breaks away, sucking in a heavy breath. Bellamy takes the opportunity to trail his mouth down her jaw, her neck, her shoulder, anywhere he can find more skin.

“Bellamy,” she sighs, breath a hot whisper in his ear. He drags her mouth back down to his, wants to learn what his name tastes like on her tongue.

He lets himself stay lost in the feeling of her surrounding him, the weight of her on top of his thighs and the heat of her mouth moving against his. Until Clarke’s fingers turn rough, moving down to his shoulders to dig in hard. Holding on like she’s afraid he’s going to disappear out from under her. Her kiss goes sloppy, urgent, desperation seeping in around the edges, as she grinds down in his lap and tries to make him forget what space between them feels like. She lets out a low whine that thrums all the way down through him, and that’s when his brain lurches back to reality. Bellamy wrenches his mouth away with considerable effort, shallow breaths not coming quick enough.

“Clarke,” he says, around the gravel in his throat. 

She’s not to be deterred though, moving to mouth at his jaw instead. He thunks his head back against the wall and grips his hands tight on her hips. Clarke takes it for encouragement, bites lightly at the thin skin beneath his ear.

“Clarke,” he tries again, as forcefully as he can manage.

She does stop then, the eagerness draining out of her bit by bit, but she doesn’t pull away from him. Instead she buries her face into his neck, the fever pitch of moments before dissipating quickly.

“I know,” she breathes into his skin.

She sounds a little defeated, and that’s the last thing he wants.

“I don’t think you do.” Bellamy pushes at her shoulders a little, but she won’t budge. He wraps his arms around her back instead and rests his head against hers, waiting for their breathing to even out together.

He gives it another minute or two before he tries again. “Hey, look at me?

When she does, it’s his own well-worn fear he sees reflecting back at him out of those eyes he knows so well. But he can’t lose his nerve now. She’s brought them this far, he’ll get them the rest of the way. 

He tilts her chin up with two fingers, ducks his face down level with hers. He needs her to see him. “There’s no rush, you know?”

She laughs, watery and a little incredulous, and he gets it. He does. It’s not like the ground has been kind to either of them when it comes to having enough time. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

“I don’t know if you noticed, but we saved the world. Sort of. Our people are safe, anyway. They’re going to be. We’ll make sure of it. But--it means we’ve got time.” He tucks a soft strand of hair behind her ear. “We can _make_  
time. If that’s what you want.”

“They’re never going to be _safe_.” She says it helplessly, eyes imploring. 

And no. They aren’t. He knows that, too. More than most, he knows there’s always going to be another war to fight, that safety for the people he cares about comes with a price. One he’ll pay over and over again, with his hands, his body, with his whole ragged heart if it means no one else has to.

But that just means nothing’s changed. Nothing needs to. “So what else is new? We’re probably always going to be in the middle of some crisis. Or blindly staring down the beginning of a new one. It’s never going to get easier, Clarke.”

“I know that. Of course I know that.”

“Then why hurry? This doesn't have to change anything. It _doesn’t_ change anything. Doesn’t change how I already feel about you.” He ghosts his hands down her arms, trying to dislodge the words from his throat, the ones that will make her understand. “You and me? This thing we have? It matters to me, more than anything. I can’t--I can’t lose it. I can’t lose you. And--we’re already doing the thing, you know? The rest,” he waves his hand vaguely in the air, “it can wait. We’ve got _time_.”

Clarke searches his face for a long moment and he makes himself meet her gaze, won’t let himself look away. Bellamy doesn’t know what she finds there, but her expression clears, softening into something hopeful.

She disentangles their limbs carefully, and stands to offer him a hand to haul him up. “You should call Raven. We’re staying here tonight.”

He blinks at her a few times. The last few minutes have been a little dizzying. Even so, he takes her hand and lets her pull him up. He never minds letting her manhandle him a little. “Yeah?”

“I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted.”

He feels the smile tugging at his mouth. “Yeah. I could sleep.”

Bellamy radios Arkadia, while Clarke busies herself improvising a bed out of whatever leftover detritus hasn’t already been cleared away to be repurposed by the exodus teams. He shrugs out of his jacket and rustles through his pack for his water canteen, takes a big gulp before holding it out to her. She just shakes her head, reaching out to pull him down and settle herself in his arms again as he drapes his jacket over the both of them.

The wind outside has died down, nothing but a soft whisper whistling distantly around them. Her hand is on his collarbone drawing small circles on his skin, and the last bits of tension he’d been holding onto slowly bleed away.

“Bell?” she says, her voice low and sleep-warm.

“Hmm?”

“I’m sorry I came here without you. I just--I just wanted to see it again. I should have waited for you.”

It’s hard to be mad at the way things worked out. “It’s okay. I’m here now.”

“Yeah. You are,” she yawns, and the last thing he feels before sleep draws him under is her toes curling into his shin. 

In the morning, he wakes to her hair in his mouth and her breath hot on his neck. She stirs in his arms, and he tightens them around her with the sure, aching knowledge that he never wants to wake up any other way ever again.

Clarke blinks the sleep from her eyes and smiles up at him, uncomplicated in a way he’s maybe never seen on her before. She presses a light kiss to his jaw, and the corner of his mouth. “Good morning.”

He grins and chases after her mouth, pinching her elbow when she moves away. “It is, isn’t it?”

She laughs and swats at him, before rolling over and stretching her body out in a long line. If he steals a greedy glance at the smooth skin just below where her shirt has ridden up, well, he doesn’t think she’ll mind.

They’re both slow to get moving, Clarke folding their makeshift bedding unnecessarily, Bellamy rummaging through his bag for a couple of ration packs and the canteen. He hands them off to Clarke and they eat in a companionable silence the same way they do everything else, backs against the wall, and side by side.

And then, all too soon, it’s time to go. Time to leave, knowing they won’t be returning. That even if they somehow do, nothing here will be the same as it is now. Clarke dithers for a moment in front of the hatch, casting her gaze everywhere around the room but the spot on the floor where her sketchbook fell forgotten last night.

For a minute, it looks like she might actually leave it here, whatever sentimental feeling that had possessed her to come looking for it yesterday gone with the morning light peeking in through the poorly patched hole Murphy blew in the wall.

So Bellamy bends over to scoop it up himself, tucking it into his pack for safekeeping. Clarke’s right that they don’t need it, there’s nothing in there that they don’t already carry with them every day. But he thinks they might want it anyway.

When he looks up, she’s watching from across the room, with a small, private smile on her face that might be the best thing he’s ever seen.

“Anything else?” he asks, gesturing around the room.

“No, I think we’ve got everything we need,” she says, her gentle smile still lighting up every dark corner inside him.

Bellamy follows her down the ladder, and she’s already waiting in the doorway when he gets to the bottom, a silhouette framed in morning gold.

The urge to stop to absorb this moment is fleeting. He doesn’t spin slowly around the room for one last look, doesn’t take any longer to breathe in the space than he ever has.

Clarke is reaching for him, so he takes her hand and steps out into the sunshine, heading home.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy show week guys!! I swear I just wanted them to talk about Wells for a few minutes, and then somehow the rest of this happened. Just trying to stretch my very, very rusty writing muscles again. Let me know what you think!


End file.
